Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Just in case you read the title and thought "oh man, more color?", I've kept it to a minimum here ;) Although the concepts used in creating today's script were covered in our previous posts on using color in the shell and creating a simple color menu (both for Linux and Unix), this one is just different enough that I thought it might be of interest to some folks out there.

Today's script is actually for a very specific brand of Linux: Cygwin for Windows XP (I think you could get away with using this script letter-for-letter on Windows 2000, but I can't be sure about ME and Vista).

The script interface is designed so that you can access the Windows Control Panel directly from your default Cygwin Bash shell. Check out the picture above for a look at it in action (breathtaking... ;). Unfortunately, I have yet to figure out how to make Cygwin control the Control Panel applets once they've launched in Windows. I believe it might be possible with some Tk button pushing, but that's beyond where I'm at with Cygwin.

The script can be run simply from the command line and requires no arguments (Although it does assume that your Windows environment is setup correctly and your system knows where its system32 folder is):

user@hostpc ~ ./xpcpanel.sh

You'll note that not every single control panel option is included in our Linux menu shell script. I picked the top 16 (This is a subjective rating system of course ;). All of the other applets should be listed under your main Windows directory, in the system32 folder and named something like "applet.cpl". For instance, the output from an "ls" on my machine comes out to around 30 applets. They can all be run using the "control" command, like so:

user@hostpc ~ control main.cpl

And here's the complete list of applets you can use to customize this menu (The number and availability may vary depending on your system, but this should be a fair representation. Also note that /cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/system32 directory is actually C:\WINDOWS\system32 if you use Windows to navigate):

And here it is. I hope you enjoy it and find it useful. Once I'm on the Linux command line, I don't want to futz around with Windows unless I have to, and this script helps out a little :)

And, oh yes, note also that this is a fairly long menu (16 control panel items alone), so the default Cygwin window won't be big enough to fit it all in. As long as you enter a value (it can even be bogus) and hit any key, it will redraw the screen so you can resize your window as many times as you want)